Urashima – A Story

This is an experiment with writing English.

It is a re-write of the old Japanese story: Urashimataro

A FISHERMAN CALLED URASHIMA

a story retold in seven levels from seven perspectives

the mysterious power of the word
the mysterious power of English
the mysterious power of language
the mysterious power of thought
the mysterious power of the mind
the mysterious power of the heart
the mysterious power of the infinite one

Note the transition from speech back to thought then the confusion of perception and thought which masks the presence of the infinite one .. within …

Link to Synopsis of the Story

Rough Notes on Language and Perception

We remember of course that language is the medium of thought as well as the edifice of speech but thought is more than language. Thought seems to come from a deeper place in being than language.

If we see thoughts as concepts or bubbles and the lining together of these bubbles creates propositions, sentences, evolutionary processes, then we see that thought is a kind of coalescing of bubbles from a primal soup or sea of energetic experience.

If spoken language is the crystallized or solidified or liquified form of thought then where does the thought come from before it was expressible in words?

What is the composition of that sea of electrical energy called “mind” out of which thought arises?

One clue seems to be the idea that perception and thought are linked and somehow they determine the progress of the thought and ultimately language which it becomes.

Words and Concepts

Concept: four legged animal

Word: cow, horse, dog

Concepts are:

general and specific

simple and complex

abstract and concrete

Sometimes an idea or concept has no available word. Each language has different concepts to describe the world. In a Dayak language in Borneo it has been recorded that there is a word for:

the part of a tree to the height of a man
the part of a tree from the man’s head to the first branches.
The rest of the tree.

but no word for

the entire tree

Similarly there is:

The Sapir Whorf Theory -the idea that language heavily influences perception

Torres Straight Incident with pronouns

A Torres Strait language has no personal pronouns for location like “my”, “his”, “Next to me” ..everything is sun-centred and a man focues his opercpetion on the world from the point of view of sun..in a film a man recounted this story and recounted the same story twenty years later, remembering in his language the location of the sun within the story as the arbiter of location

to the west of me
to the east of me ..

towards the sun
away from the sun,

rather than

“behind me”
“next to me”
etc.

If language heavily influences perception yet there is a deeper pre-language, pre-cognition/pre-thought level of perception and being that can be experienced, then perhaps it is that state or series of states that was experienced when we speak of the states which the Buddha experienced as he sat under the Bodhi tree, calmed his mind and self-remembered.

He saw through the illusions of seeming polarities to a oneness beyond the illusion and a simple ineffable reality towards which one can be guided by following eight simple points.

The Eightfold Path

Right Action
Right Speech
Right Livelihood
Right Contemplation
Right Understanding
……..